tian galley pointed to
the mighty columns that stand on the summit of the rock--the remains, as
you know well, of the great temple erected to the goddess Athena, who
looked down from that high shrine with triumph at her conquered rival
Poseidon;--well, our Greek pilot, pointing to those columns, said, `That
was the school of the great philosopher Aristotle.' And at Athens
itself, the monk who acted as our guide in the hasty view we snatched,
insisted most on showing us the spot where Saint Philip baptised the
Ethiopian eunuch, or some such legend."

"Talk not of monks and their legends, young man!" said Bardo,
interrupting Tito impetuously. "It is enough to overlay human hope and
enterprise with an eternal frost to think that the ground which was
trodden by philosophers and poets is crawled over by those insect-swarms
of besotted fanatics or howling hypocrites."

"_Perdio_, I have no affection for them," said Tito, with a shrug;
"servitude agrees well with a religion like theirs, which lies in the
renunciation of all that makes life precious to other men. And they
carry the yoke that befits them: their matin chant is drowned by the
voice of the muezzin, who, from the gallery of the high tower on the
Acropolis, calls every Mussulman to his prayers. That tower springs
from the Parthenon itself; and every time we paused and directed our
eyes towards it, our guide set up a wail, that a temple which had once
been won from the diabolical uses of the pagans to become the temple of
another virgin than Pallas--the Virgin Mother of God--was now again
perverted to the accursed ends of the Moslem. It was the sight of those
walls of the Acropolis, which disclosed themselves in the distance as we
leaned over the side of our galley when it was forced by contrary winds
to anchor in the Piraeus, that fired my father's mind with the
determination to see Athens at all risks, and in spite of the sailors'
warnings that if we lingered till a change of wind, they would depart
without us: but, after all, it was impossible for us to venture near the
Acropolis, for the sight of men eager in examining `old stones' raised
the suspicion that we were Venetian spies, and we had to hurry back to
the harbour."

"We will talk more of these things," said Bardo, eagerly. "You must
recall everything, to the minutest trace left in your memory. You will
win the gratitude of after-times by leaving a record of the aspect
Greece bore while yet the bar